Tag Archives: plumbing

we came back from a week away while much of region was plunged in subzero temperatures. the result? the pipes that supply water to our laundry machine in our poorly insulated mudroom froze. yay (not)!

we’ve had some experience with this over the years and if we know it’s going to get -10F overnight or colder we proactively bring in a space heater to keep the room warm enough to prevent freezing. no such luck at being proactive this time since we were out of town but i thought i’d give it a try only to remember we very cleverly sold our Super Awesome Space Heater. why would we do that? apparently so i’d have to run to Wally World in the freezing cold to check out their selection. SPOILER: their craptacular space heater didn’t unfreeze the pipes.

How’s my first day of 2018? Sub zero temps froze water lines in mud room so laundry machine is not working. Aaaand we have huge pile of laundry. Bought a space heater at Wally World that didn’t work so packaged it up…

when the pipes have frozen in the past ( has happened a couple of times even being proactive with a space heater ) we’ve used a hairdryer to unfreeze them. i was going to do just that today ( but with a more powerful paint removing heating thing ) but made the mistake of googling around and reading horror stories of people heating up frozen pipes that were busted, unleashing A Very Bad Scene when the frozen water becomes a gushing liquid geyser. the frozen pipes are in an inaccessible area under the mudroom ( I KNOW! no access from the basement. who would build a mudroom in wisconsin with water pipes basically running outside exposed with no easy access? who? WHOOOOOOOOOO? ).

do i just go for it and heat them up as i’ve so cavalierly done in the past?

Conflux :: A Confluence of Curiousness

i’m not sure how to square these findings with the fact that i’ve long said that in a parallel universe very close to our own i live alone in cabin in the middle of nowhere writing manifestos: “The effect of population density on life satisfaction was therefore more than twice as large for low-IQ individuals than for high-IQ individuals,” they found. And “more intelligent individuals were actually less satisfied with life if they socialized with their friends more frequently.”

the heart warming fable of thanksgiving, unsurprisingly, ends up being a whole lot more complicated than some of us were taught and answers the nagging question of how squanto spoke perfect english when the pilgrims arrived and what was happening during the 100 year interim between columbus and the pilgrims ( spoiler: it involves human trafficking, enslavement and villages being wiped out ). and if you’re a stickler for tradition, you should put ditch the turkey and cranberry sauce for salted pork and olives since the spanyiards were the first to celebrate thanksgiving 50 years before the pilgrims.

“…researchers from a Bosch startup called Deepfield Robotics presented a paper on “Vision-Based High-Speed Manipulation for Robotic Ultra-Precise Weed Control,” which has like four distinct exciting-sounding phrases in it.”IEEE Spectrum

after updating to iOS 9 and el capitan i’ve been having troubles synching photos from my iphone to my macbook air. the mac would recognize the iphone but no photos would show up in the photos application or image capture. it was driving me nuts. turns out, if you have non-apple services like dropbox running that sync your photos to non-icloud services you have to turn them off.

having run a half a dozen marathons, i can’t imagine finishing in 3:05. even more unimaginable in full amish garb so kudos to leroy stolzfus. the whole article is great read but now i want to know more of the backstory on why he started to run: “A few years ago, Stolzfus got “involved with some stuff” he said he shouldn’t have. His brother-in-law suggested he start running instead when he was tempted. He took the suggestion to heart, and went out for a run.”

huh, who knew edward tufte has a farm with 234-acres of landscape sculpture fields that he opens to the public once a year. i’d love to make a trip. and i also love the article’s description of tufte, “[he] is also known as a genius of data visualization, professor emeritus of political science, statistics, and computer science at Yale, an author of books on information design, and a hater of PowerPoint.

“The Chagossian people have a word, in their Creole language, for heartbreak: sagren. It is a profound sorrow which refers to the loss of a home, and the impossibility of returning to it. As we build new worlds with our technologies, knitted from fiber-optic light and lines of code, it is incumbent on us to ensure it does not reproduce the erasures and abuses of the old, but properly accounts for the rights and liberties of every one of us.”citizen-ex